It's 2017 and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after 43 docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose. When Aureliano was very young, his mother left without reason or trace. Aureliano is attempting to write a novel that mirrors his mother's unexplained disappearance while shattering Magical Realism as a genre in the process. It doesn't help though, that he's named after the protagonist of a touchstone of the Magical Realist canon, and raised in the mythical town of Comala.
There's nothing magical, in the genre sense, in Morrison's story. There are no magical rivers, enchanted messages, babies born with tails. Morrison's dissonance is real — people get disappeared, they suffer addictions, writer's block, crazy parents, crazier shamans, blank pages, corruption, the loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real Pan-American life — because all of this we are also explicitly suffering up North — Morrison finds his magic.
Without a grave to visit, how do we honor and care for our dead? Do we mourn for those who have disappeared, though they might still be alive? And what is the role of fiction, if it has a role at all, in confronting these problems and the world that spawned them? That Pages of Mourning raises such questions is a testament to its importance and ambition ... Morrison handles these interwoven narratives with great dexterity and an expert sense for the interplay of humor and dailiness alongside chronic grief.
